The Tempest
Old Vic, until 21 August
Sucker Punch
Royal Court, until 31 July
Last week when I trotted over to the Old Vic to see The Tempest I had no idea I was about to experience one of the strangest performances of my life. About 20 minutes into the show a heavily built man arrived and installed himself with much effortful wheezing and groaning in the seat just behind me. His rasps and gasps continued for some time and when their tremors finally subsided I was able to return my attention to the play. But then he fell asleep. And then he started snoring. And snoring and snoring. These were not the restful snuffles of a dozing poodle but a continual cannonade of triple-thick raspberries that blasted out across the stalls and were clearly audible, to judge from the numbers of swivelling heads, by half the audience and most of the cast as well.
Irritated play-goers poked the snoozer awake several times but he repulsed them vigorously. ‘I have a condition. It is unavoidable,’ he said, and fell straight back into his raucous slumbers. The woman next to me walked out in frustration. Alerted by this disturbance, an usher sidled over and shook the man’s shoulder with a gentle offer of help. ‘Nothing can be done,’ said the wakened giant, ‘unless you have a magic potion to cure my sinusitis.’ As the usher withdrew in defeat, his victor was himself already falling captive to the coils of sweet oblivion. Fresh sallies of trumpeting began to rumble all around me. And so, with white noise blocking my bandwidth, I struggled for two hours to concentrate on the play.
I feel confident that I witnessed, or half-witnessed, a competent but not outstanding production. Stephen Dillane makes a stylish if rather detached Prospero and looks gracefully wasted in his rock-star costume of dishevelled pinstripes. And Juliet Rylance captures all of Miranda’s wide-eyed and earnest optimism. Some reviewers have objected that Dillane mumbled his lines but I’m afraid I can’t comment. He’d have needed a bullhorn to speak audibly at the show I witnessed.
After two years it’s fair to say that Sam Mendes hasn’t fully met the expectations that greeted the inauguration of his globe-trotting ‘Bridge Project’. (Strange name that — it’s a theatre tour, not a transport scheme.) There are fewer big stars in the company this year so we’re missing the experimental fusion between England’s top stage talent and America’s biggest movie icons. And the tour’s Marco Polo ambitions may have accidentally hampered the director. Mendes needs to present Shakespeare to audiences with widely different theatrical traditions, from America to Britain, from Spain to Germany, from Singapore to New Zealand. This huge cultural range is bound to nudge the director towards the softer choice, the safer move, the less challenging option. The result is a sort of theatrical AV. It represents the triumph of the least offensive.
Roy Williams has returned to the Royal Court with a powerful examination of racism in the 1980s. His play follows the fortunes of two wayward black kids, Leon and Troy, who are invited to join a gym by an enlightened cockney boxing coach. At times the plotting suffers from Williams’s desire to cram too many issue-related plots into one story.
The best buddies have very different personalities. Leon is clever, punctilious and determined. Troy is filled with self-pitying resentment and after a violent run-in with the local cops he emigrates to America, broken, bitter and doomed. Leon’s boxing career thrives meanwhile. Within a few years he’s captured the European belt and he’s ready to have a tilt at the world title, which is held by an American fighter who, by a stunning coincidence, is none other than Troy.
The loser’s transformation began while he was working at a Detroit petrol station. He saw two thieves being chased by a cop and immediately leapt over the counter — ever eager to indulge his passion for punching policemen — and proceeded to lay into the officer. Enter America’s leading boxing scout who just happened to be passing at the right moment. He saw in Troy’s mixture of jabs, feints and uppercuts the technical qualities of a future champ. So he paid for Troy’s bail, took him off to the gym and turned him into a world-class fighter. Just like that. This transformation is hardly credible. And the plot swerves through a few other dangerous hairpin bends too. When the chirpy cockney coach discovers that Leon is dating his daughter he instantly turns from altruist to racist.
On the plus side, the boxing fights are achieved with superbly convincing effects. A flashlight and a gunshot explosion are used to evoke the physical impact of a knock-out blow. And there are fine performances from Anthony Welsh as the nasty, charismatic Troy and from Daniel Kaluuya as the shrewder, weaker and more malleable Leon. Williams is a matchless chronicler of life in London’s badlands and he compels us to accept the truth that racial tensions are a low-level, undeclared civil war which will never find an armistice day. This latest dispatch from the ghetto is as lucid and forceful as ever. But a tiny part of me wonders if Williams is approaching the end of his inspiration as a social commentator. Or if he has already reached it.
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